


Lion Oil

by larkscape



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Mental Link, Sentient Voltron Lions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 08:05:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14492538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkscape/pseuds/larkscape
Summary: The paladins share a mystical bond with their lions, Allura had said. Somehow he didn’t think this was what she meant.Lance starts noticing some changes.





	Lion Oil

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery content warnings are available in the end notes for those who want details on what they're getting into. The title is a palindrome and that's all Loren's fault.

The awareness crept up on Lance slowly, over weeks of training drills and battles and bonding exercises. He didn't notice as it happened, but one morning he woke up with Blue right there in his head like she usually was these days and it occurred to him that,  _huh, it's crazy what you get used to when you're way out in space._

Giant psychic space lion robot purring in his brain. Not something he'd ever find back on Earth, but okay, why not? Blue was a classy lady and he liked her.

His chest lit up with a warmth that told him Blue liked him right back and then he felt something not unlike a hug but inside his mind, which he translated as Blue affectionately headbutting him. A little curl of possessive joy flared in their connection. He wasn't sure if that was from him or Blue or the both of them together.

Suddenly Blue tensed and rumbled a warning.  _Galra. Be ready._ Two ticks later, Allura's voice came over the intercom.

“Paladins, we have an incoming Galra battlecruiser! To your lions!”

 

The longer Lance spent with Blue, the more she spoke to him.

‘Spoke’ was perhaps the wrong word. She didn’t use words, exactly, but she formed impressions in his head, and as time went on they became more detailed, more complex. It  _felt_ like speaking. Now, as they flew toward the battlecruiser, she kept up a running commentary of thoughts and images in the back of his mind:  _fighter behind you, Yellow is coming, watch the ion cannon, want to use my tail laser?_

And when the last fighter was destroyed and the battlecruiser had been turned into an impromptu fireworks show, her joy was his, her roar and his yell perfectly in synch.

The paladins share a mystical bond with their lions, Allura had said.

She didn't know the half of it.

 

After the battle, they’d all lurched back to their own quarters to wash off the sweat and stress of combat.

Lance entered his bathroom on unsteady legs, leaving a trail of discarded armor across the whole length of his room, and started the shower wearing only the armor’s black undersuit. He was beyond ready to get under the hot water where he could relax for a while. He tugged at the zip on the back of his neck.

It wouldn’t come loose.

Wow, he must be even more tired than he’d thought if he couldn't handle a simple zipper. He tightened his grip on the tab and tugged again.

Nope, that was seriously stuck.

Come  _on._ He just wanted a shower; was that so much to ask? Craning his arm behind his head to try to work the zipper pull loose was making his bicep cramp, not to mention how the suit pulling taut across his throat made him feel a bit choked and claustrophobic. No one liked being strangled by their clothing.

With a final sharp tug, the zipper came free. Lance heaved a relieved sigh and pulled the tab the rest of the way down.

_“Thank_ you,” he grumbled. “Jeez.”

Blue laughed sleepily in the back of his head.

“Yeah, yeah, you hush. You’re supposed to me on my side.”

The room was filling with steam from the running shower and Lance was impatient to get in. He reached behind one shoulder to pull the undersuit the rest of the way off.

It wouldn’t budge.

Twice in a row? This was getting downright weird.

Had his sweat glued the fabric to him? That had never happened before, not even when he’d been fighting bots in the training room for hours, but he supposed there was a first time for everything. He had to scrape the open edge of the undersuit from his skin with his fingernails, but once it came up he could get a decent grip and start peeling.

That’s what it was:  _peeling._ The fabric stuck to him like a vinyl sticker to glass, or a peel to its orange. He was uncomfortably reminded of shucking corn in his mom’s kitchen.

He just wanted it  _off._ Too sticky, too hot in here with all the steam, too much contact on his skin. He knew he wasn’t actually going to suffocate from wearing the suit, but his body hadn’t gotten that memo and his pulse kept climbing as he pulled and yanked and  _pulled_ until the thing let go and he could throw it at the floor in a wad.

Okay. He was fine. It was just leftover adrenaline making him jumpy, nothing to get worked up over.

Still, he eyed the crumpled fabric suspiciously until he climbed in the shower and the curtain blocked it from view.

As he soaped up, he got another unpleasant surprise.

_Blue? Uh, what is this?_

Faint lines in intricate, mechanical-looking patterns covered his arms. They spread from the backs of his hands all the way up to his shoulders. No, further; across his collar bones, down his chest— they were  _everywhere._ All over him. They looked kind of like pressure marks from wearing too-tight clothing, but the lines were way too precise for that.

Had they come from the undersuit?

Blue was drowsy post-battle and hardly roused at his mental prodding.

_Calm down, Lance,_ he told himself.  _Think._ There was a perfectly reasonable explanation, it was just eluding him right now. Oh! The paladin armor had all kinds of sensors and stuff built in, didn’t it? That’s all this was. He’d just gotten the interior texture of the suit pressed into his skin. It’d probably happened before and he’d never even noticed.

Nothing to worry about.

 

All the same, he checked over the armor once he was clean. The same patterns showed up on the surface of the plates.

Strange that he’d never seen them before, when they were so obvious now that he was looking.

 

Alfor died fighting Zarkon after sending the lions away and his remains were lost to space, so far as they knew — Allura and Coran were in the cryopods before he met his end, but assumptions could be made — and obviously Zarkon himself had gone dark side and found quintessence-fueled immortality. But for the first time, Lance found himself wondering what exactly had become of the other paladins.

Had Zarkon killed them all personally, or had he outsourced the task to his generals — or had something else happened to them? Were they buried somewhere? Had they been ejected from an airlock in a fancy space burial, and if so, were they just floating out there in the black even now? The lions were still here, so obviously the paladins hadn’t died in some massive explosion while piloting them.

Or maybe they had. The lions were far tougher than their paladins. Maybe Blaytz had died right here in this chair and Lance had been sitting on his last resting place all this time without even knowing.

No. That was— too morbid, too much.

He couldn’t stop thinking it, though. Dead man’s chair. A chill crept up the back of his neck.

_Blue, tell me he didn’t die in here._

Blue chuffed, fond and amused and just a little patronizing in the way that only a ten-thousand-year-old robot lion could be. Humoring him.

_Oh, Lance. He didn’t die in here._

 

The whole thing still gave him a little tremor of unease but, well… they were fighting a war. The old paladins had been fighting the same war, and casualties were an unavoidable part of reality. A paladin dying while piloting one of the lions wasn't so unlikely. Sure, it was strange to be sitting in a chair that someone had died in, but at the same time Lance felt honored to be allowed to inhabit the same space. Like he could absorb some of Blaytz's spirit just by being here.

_He was a true Paladin,_ Blue told him, and her presence in his mind swelled with a tangle of pride and possessiveness and old longing worn smooth by time.

_You miss him,_ Lance observed.

_No,_ she corrected,  _I feel him._

She nudged something deep in Lance’s chest as a demonstration and he felt a warmth there, almost too hot, and thought,  _That’s a nice way to remember someone. Will you remember me like that? Way off in the future, I mean, after we win?_

_Yes. I will feel you, too._

The way she thought it didn’t have the same sense of distance in time, but he supposed that was normal for a being with such a long life. Lance was like a mayfly to her. He’d be dust long before she started thinking about retirement. Would the lions retire? Could they even die? They were robots, after all, so he supposed eventually they might just shut down, but…

The back of his hand tingled and he scratched it absently, but when he looked down those strange lines were back, traced over his hands and up his wrists.

They were glowing this time. A soft blue. Huh.

Okay, he wanted to be alarmed about that, but Blue was awake this time and she felt so pleased about their appearance that the patterns must be a good thing. Right? Even if he hadn’t worn the armor in hours? It couldn’t be harmful if Blue was so happy about it.

Right?

 

Then they fought Zarkon, and Shiro disappeared, and things were… not great, for a while. Keith showed it the most, but they were all feeling uneven. Shiro’s absence left a tattered hole in the team’s bond.

None of the lions liked it.

Keith took over the black lion, eventually. Or rather, Black let him in.

And Blue…

Blue stopped speaking to Lance.

 

Red, though. Red was a trip and a half. Lance hardly had a chance to feel the loss of Blue's warm presence because Red was up in his business all the time. She wasn’t as talkative as Blue — Keith was a quiet dude most of the time, so that made sense; like paladin, like lion — but she was very  _present._ All her thoughts and feelings crowded into his head constantly. Waking or sleeping, it didn’t matter.

Most nights, she showed up in his dreams. Which, hey, free trip into lucid dreaming, so that was pretty cool in his book. And maybe he didn’t get any privacy, and maybe she had some awkward questions about  _those_ dreams, but that was just the price he had to pay for piloting one of the coolest robots in the universe. Not a bad trade.

It’s just— she was always there, even when she wasn’t trying to communicate, and her presence was  _loud._

 

After Shiro came back to them, things were different. He and Keith had some weird leader tension going on, but Lance knew better than to try to get in the middle of that. They’d work it out.

_Miss him,_ Red told Lance.

_Who, Keith? It’s not like he’s gone forever. Do you still talk to him?_

_No._ Her sadness crowded into his brain.  _Can’t; we’re not bonded anymore._

He’d figured it was something like that. He couldn’t talk to Blue anymore, either, even when he tried.

Red had spent so long now pressed so tight inside his mind that her emotions almost seemed like his own. He didn’t miss Keith — how could he? Keith was  _right there_ —  but  _she_ missed him and so Lance sort of did, too.

That was so strange.

_You’ve got me, though,_ Lance offered, trying to shake the foreign longing pulling at his thoughts.

_Yes._ Her mental voice rumbled with sudden happiness, fickle as any cat. She wrapped him up in warmth like a cocoon, tight, surrounding him.  _My paladin. My Lance._

She was so possessive. He wouldn’t have felt any more claimed if she’d actually scent marked him.

 

Then Keith left to work with the Blade of Marmora, and things were different again.

Red stayed the same through all the shuffling. Still overwhelmingly  _there_ in Lance’s head. If anything, she became more so.

 

“Dude, you’re starting to look really shaggy,” Lance said when Hunk walked into the kitchen one morning.

Hunk ran a hand through his messy hair. “Aw, and here I was thinking of growing it out. Really go for the Rambo look, you know?”

Lance considered this.

“Okay, yeah, I can see it. But you’ve got to let me trim up the ends, man. You look like a mountain man and not in a good way.”

“Sure, Lance, go ahead.” Hunk sent him a one-sided smile. “You can’t make it worse than it already is.”

“Aw, no, don’t challenge me like that,” Lance moaned while Hunk laughed. “Here, find a chair and a towel while I go get my scissors.”

Lance didn’t just have fancy hair-cutting scissors, he had an electric trimmer and a full set of combs, too. He was  _prepared._ This barber shop was open for business.

He sat Hunk down and got to work.

And promptly broke one of his combs.

“What the heck have you been doing to your hair?”

Hunk shrugged. “I don’t know, nothing special. I think the food goo must be full of biotin or something, though, ‘cause I swear it’s getting thicker.”

“Yeah, I’ll say. Thicker might be the understatement of the year.” The texture was strange, too, kind of rough and wiry, familiar in a way he couldn’t quite place. And it kept trying to eat Lance’s combs.

Whatever, he could deal. There was no hair that had defeated him yet and he wasn’t about to break his record.

It was weird, though. He tried not to think too hard about it.

 

“Does Yellow… talk to you? Like all the time?”

Hunk gave Lance a funny look. “Yeah? Of course she does. She’s my lion.”

“Right, right. Never mind.”

 

Pidge was elbow-deep in a rewiring project under her console when Lance wandered in. She still had bedhead and there was a cup of the coffee-equivalent she’d wrangled out of Coran on the floor next to her, but despite all the evidence that she’d rolled directly from her bed to the floor of the bridge, she was in full paladin armor.

“Do you sleep wearing that?” he asked, kicking her protruding foot. She swore at him and ducked out from the access door.

“Don’t you dare spill my not-coffee. And why not sleep in it?” Pidge shrugged and took a gulp from her cup, then made a face. “Oh, gross, it’s cold.”

“That’s what you get for being all absorbed in your projects. You shouldn’t sleep in the armor because that’s grosser than drinking cold whatever that stuff is.”

“Hey, I wash the armor! And it’s faster just wearing it than trying to put it all back on while I’m running down the hallways every time the alarms go off.”

“But don’t you get sick of wearing it all the time?”

“Not really. It’s comfortable. I’m kind of surprised you’re not doing it; most of the rest of us are.”

Lance found he couldn’t argue with that. Thinking about it, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Shiro out of armor, and even Hunk was in his more often than not.

Still. It seemed odd. And he wasn’t planning on changing his own armor-wearing habits any time soon; no matter how he tried, he couldn’t quite forget that day when the undersuit hadn’t wanted to come free from his skin. Even knowing that he was jumping at shadows, the memory just… made him a little uneasy.

No big deal. He was a fast dresser and he had the fastest lion now; he could accept a handicap to make the race to the battlefield more fair to the rest of the team.

“Since you’re here,” Pidge said, “you're helping me. Hold this.” She handed him a spool of shielded wire on her way back under the console, and when the back of her armored hand caught the light, a very familiar pattern of lines stood out. Why hadn’t he noticed them before? Apparently they were on everyone’s armor, not just his. Was he just that oblivious? Had they been there the whole time?

He needed to stop borrowing trouble. No point making a fuss about it; all he was doing was freaking himself out. Freaking himself out even more.

He idly rubbed the coil of wire in his hands. The braided shielding under his fingers felt oddly familiar, and with a jolt he finally realized what the strange texture he’d noticed in Hunk’s hair had reminded him of: the castle’s wires.

Was Pidge’s hair looking extra thick and fluffy lately? Was his own?

…What was happening to them?

 

“Hey Allura, listen. Can I ask you something? About the lions?”

“Certainly, Lance. What is it?”

Allura watched him attentively. She looked so…  _normal._ She wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about. It was all little things, coincidences, stuff that seemed unremarkable to everyone else. Thicker hair — it was the food. Wearing the armor all day every day — practicality. His lion always in his head — good, they had a strong bond.

He couldn’t explain to himself why he was so nervous. How could he explain it to her?

Jeez, he must be going crazy.

“…You know what? Forget I said anything. I answered my own question.”

 

He didn’t even try to ask Shiro.

 

Lance dropped his arms to the seat of the pilot’s chair. They’d done it. Another planet liberated, another Galra fleet in pieces.

All the air rushed out of him. He could hear Hunk shouting in triumph over the comms, could hear Pidge’s laughter and Shiro saying, “Well done, everyone; now let’s get back to the castle. I want to sleep for a  _week.”_

Lance leaned back in sweaty triumph and lifted one leg to balance his ankle on his opposite knee.

Or he tried to. It didn’t work.

His boots were stuck to the cockpit floor like they’d melted to it. He gripped the edge of the seat for leverage to lean down and see what was up, and that’s when he found that the armor on the backs of his thighs was melted into the chair, too.

What the—? There wasn’t even a seam, just a smooth transition from the not-metal of the armor into the not-fabric of the chair with no gaps or edges or anything he could get his fingers under.

He’d joked about being so exhausted he’d become one with his chair many times before — in the wake of eight hours spent shepherding his younger siblings around the fair, or more recently after Shiro finally dismissed them at the end of a gruelling training session — but that was supposed to be hyperbole.

This was not hyperbole.

A frisson of fear slithered up his back. He was  _actually_ becoming one with the pilot’s chair. He couldn’t move his legs.

“Guys?” he croaked into the comm pickup. “…Hey, guys?”

Nothing. At some point when he’d been  _calmly investigating_ (totally calm, nothing to see here, nope, Lance wasn’t panicking at all) the place where his armor merged with the upholstery, the comms had gone silent. No shouts, no laughter, no Pidge teasingly complaining about the repair work she’d be stuck helping Coran with since Lance kept getting  _distracted from watching my left flank, jerk, I thought you were a professional, stop chasing after every hot Galra fighter you see._

Nothing at all.

“Shiro?” he called. “Hunk, Pidge, Allura? …Coran?” His voice cracked on the last one.

No answer, not from any of the other lions and not from the Castleship. Not even a crackle of static. Where were they?

“This isn’t funny, guys!”

He slapped the manual comms button on the dash, but the screen in front of him remained blank.

So he hit the button again. And again. Again, again, again— this was panic, wasn’t it? Yeah, he was  _freaking out._  But that was justified. Where was Shiro? Where was Hunk? Hunk should be answering. Hunk always answered him, even that time in second year when Lance had shaken him awake at 3 am the night before their physics final because Lance’d had way too much coffee and couldn’t remember Planck’s constant, and whatever was happening to him right now was  _so much more important_  than passing a physics class.

But his helmet was silent, and the screen was blank.

Lance still couldn’t move his legs. He could hardly  _feel_ his legs. He grabbed the controls with the intent of turning right back around toward the castle.

He froze as Red’s presence grew in his mind, large and familiar as his own breathing now with how close she’d been for the last — how long? How many phoebs had she spent climbing into his head so deep that she felt like ivy woven through a fence? And usually she made him feel safe, but in that moment, when Lance was pinned to his seat and cut off from his team, her closeness snapped over from comforting to strangling.

She wasn’t ivy. She was kudzu, thick and fast-growing, choking out all competition. Lance's pulse sped, his breathing quickened.

Red was undeniably alien. He’d always known that, somewhere, but now it was at the forefront of his mind, where she loomed. She was ancient and in his head she felt _alien._

_Paladin, my paladin, my Lance. Mine. Shh._

_What’s happening?_ He tried to fire the engines, tried to get himself back to the castle, but his arms wouldn’t move now, either. Or his shoulders.  _Am I— am I sinking in?_

Terror gripped him by the windpipe.

_What’s wrong with this chair, what—_ When he glanced down, his hands were starting to look like something from a Salvador Dali painting, curving in unnatural ways around the controls. He couldn’t feel them.  _Oh god. What. No._

Those patterns were all lit up in blue again, up to his wrists.

_Shh. Lance. You’re safe, you’re mine. Blue wants you, too, because she’s greedy, but you are_ mine.  _She gave you up and now she has Allura. And I have you._

His hands twisted, drooped. They were totally numb, thank god, because there was no way that was just the armor acting like taffy left out on a boardwalk bench. His fingers, his actual fingers, were bending like they had no bones in them.

Then they sagged further and dripped, right off the controls, and what was once his left middle finger dropped to the floor with a sickening splat.

He screamed, and choked on the sound.

_Oh my god. What— oh god. Why is this happening? Red,_ no,  _what are you doing?_

Because it was her, somehow; she was causing this. Lance was melting like the plastic army men he’d put in the oven when he was five, and he could feel Red’s satisfaction humming between his ears. It was  _loud._

His— no, he couldn’t think of it as his finger, no way. The  _piece of his gauntlet_ that had fallen was sinking into the floor. It looked like nothing so much as ice cream dropped from a spoon, a smear of black fabric with a little swirl of red, flattening out into a puddle and leaving behind a greasy spot until that, too, was gone.

His stomach turned over.

_Don’t think about it, don‘t think about it, don’t think—_

Without the support of the controls under his hands (his  _hands,_ no, oh no; they were a drippy mess he couldn’t tear his horrified gaze away from), his arms had flopped uselessly to the edges of the pilot’s chair. He still couldn’t move them, and on some level he was grateful because he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually feel himself liquefy. Except maybe, if he felt the pain, he might have passed out by now and he wouldn’t be  _watching_ as the paladin armor glowed along his forearms, as all those intricate patterns he'd dismissed before lit up and the plates went gooey and liquid and— god, and him along with them, and his arms and the armor that had fused itself to him began to soak into the chair.

Red was absorbing him. She was turning him into a freaking smoothie and  _absorbing_ him.

_My paladin,_ she crooned sweetly, like this was normal, like this was good.  _My Lance._

He made a noise high in his throat, a helpless, horrified, animal noise, and watched his unresponsive wrists melt and shrink and disappear right before his eyes. Was he hallucinating? Please, let this all be some terrible dream from eating too much freaky green goo at dinner. He cast around for anything that might tell him this wasn’t real— you were supposed to check clocks, right? And if the numbers made no sense then you were dreaming? But there were no clocks in the cockpit.

Let him wake up in a healing pod with the team all around him. He’d make an awful joke about getting  _inside_ Red, get it, cause she’s a  _cougar,_ and Pidge would swat at him and Shiro would look all disapproving to hide his smile and—

_Please._

But no. He could tell by the way Red’s presence curled around him, by the awful churning in his stomach, by the heaving of his chest as he gasped for breath around the high-pitched noises he couldn’t stop making.

No, this was real.

This was real and he was trapped. He was being liquefied and— and eaten?— by a giant space lion robot, alone, thousands of lightyears from home. And no one could hear him.

No one was coming.

A hysterical sob tore from his throat.

“No, no, nonono—”

_We’re becoming one,_ Red purred in his mind, serenely happy.  _The way it is meant to be. The way the others have._

The paladins share a mystical bond with their lions, Allura had said. Somehow he didn’t think this was what she meant.

It was happening to the rest of the team, too, wasn’t it? That’s why the comms went dead.

The lions were made from the ore of the transdimensional comet. Red was quite literally not from this reality. She was so far beyond anything Lance had ever found familiar, and just because she would rumble all warm and sweet in his head didn’t mean she was  _good._ Not by human standards. Not by any metric that valued his autonomy.

He should never have forgotten that, and now it was too late.

The liquefaction was creeping up — his forearms were totally gone, his elbows melting like wax held over a bonfire, his  _knees were dissolving._ He was a fly caught in a spider’s web. Everything still glowed with that pale blue light.

The animal part of his brain was curled up and gibbering. The rest of him tried to follow suit.

_No, please—_

_Shh. I have you, my stubborn one._ Red radiated peace, satisfaction. In her view, there was nothing wrong.

The rest went fast. Knees, thighs, hips, sucked into the chair like he was soda spilled on a couch. Glowing patterns, numbness, thick syrupy liquid, and then— gone. With a faint sizzle.

That hissing noise was his skin. His  _skin._ Melting like plastic.

He screamed again, or at least he was pretty sure he did because he could feel it tearing up his throat, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of his own pounding heart and the awful hiss filling his ears.

Chest now.

How was he breathing? How was his pulse still throbbing in the underside of his tongue like that when his heart had just dissolved?

_Red? Please. Please, no._

_Shh._

Biceps, shoulders. No more gun shows for Lance, no more beach body.

No more body. No more beach. He was never getting back to Earth, was he?

Oh, there went the pulse.

Neck.

Red hushed him again as he whimpered, and then there was nothing.

 

The pilot’s seat was empty, and warm, and Red was whole and wild and  _full._

Alfor had evaded her at the end. He sent her away from him before she could bring him home. But she had her paladin now; Lance’s quintessence was tucked deep and safe and unchanging inside her.

There was one more for her, though.

Blue understood. Blue, flush with the glow of Allura’s alchemy and feeling charitable to the smallest lion, who had been without a paladin’s quintessence for the longest, even helped her stretch across the distance of two hundred galaxies to her other wayward paladin’s quarters with the Galra rebels so she could call him back.

Yes, Keith would be here soon. She might have to fight Black for him.

Red flew back to the castle.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery Content Warnings:
> 
> Not a happy ending. No, I take that back; the lions are happy. Everyone else? Not so much.
> 
> Details: Light on blood, but bodies do Wrong Things, mostly involving skin and hair. At the end, Lance gets liquefied and absorbed into Red's pilot chair. It's implied that the same thing happens to all the other paladins.


End file.
